TALK TIME:The Galway Arts Festival is only days away now. Exactly how stressed out are you? Very. It's okay sometimes when you're working in your own little bubble, you can underestimate the size of the whole gig. But every so often, you lift your head above the parapet and think "Jesus, Mary and Joseph". But it's grand. It's fine. These occasional reality checks are a necessity.
Describe the scene at your workshop in the Fisheries Field. At this moment, I've got a very busy production manager working with all manner of cables and batteries and lights, which he'll be using to light some of the props that will be featuring in the parade. Another one of our artists is battering away, making a shoal of fish to go with a large Chagall-like salmon with wings. Meanwhile, in the costume room, they're cutting up hundreds of yards of taffeta to create punk ballerina costumes. So it's all systems go.
How many people are working on this?There are 14 onsite at the moment, but there will be about 200 performers in the parade on the 19th. Everything is made out of found objects this year, so there's a kind of rag-and-bone, junkyard mechanic feel to it.
Your own involvement with Macnas dates all the way back to the 'Zooropa' tour with U2 in the early 1990s.Yes, I got involved with Macnas straight out of school. I was a volunteer on the Zooropa tour, but only on the Irish leg. But you can imagine being onstage with about a hundred other performers in Croke Park at about 17 or 18 years of age – it was very exciting.
That's still very much the image a lot of people associate with Macnas – the papier-mache heads and fellas banging drums.Well yes, Macnas made its name through large, spectacle-based work with very theatrical trilogies like the Táin, Buile Shuibhne and Balor. But like any company it kind of morphed into a lot of different areas subsequent to that.
You've worked on lots of other festivals in Ireland and abroad. What is it that makes the Galway Arts Festival so special?It's wild, it's raucous, it's a little bit bold and a little bit mad – not unlike the west of Ireland itself. I grew up in Galway and I was just spoilt as a child, standing in the lashing rain in the cathedral car park watching all of these amazing companies perform for me for free. It was an incredible privilege.
The Volvo Ocean Race has already been through Galway this summer and there's a major recession going on. Could this mean that I might actually be able to get a drink on Quay Street this year?We're flat bang in the middle of a recession now, yes, and that's obviously very challenging for everyone involved. The parade has always been a free gig, so we've had to be far more inventive in how we work. We certainly didn't have the budget that would have been there in other years. But I think that we as a society still need to come together and we still need to celebrate – it's a great panacea.
Almost the very first line of the festival blurb refers to Galway as the fastest-growing city in Europe. They've been saying that since the mid-1990s – it must be just an enormous, sprawling metropolis by now.That's so Galway. I love that about the place – they've been using the same catchphrases since I was about 10. Galway will always be the fastest-growing city in Europe. But you know, I've been away, on and off, for about a decade and it has never really changed. It's still the place that people pop into for a pint and end up staying for three years. There's an indigenous cultural character to the place that can be its most appealing characteristic at certain times – and I say this with great honesty and sensitivity to where I'm from – and can do itself no favours at other times. Macnas is like the biggest divorcee in Galway: everybody's got their own say on what we should or shouldn't be doing.
Finally, what are the nightmare scenarios that could unfold between now and show time?Oh God, it could be any one of a number of things. We're building this 17-foot-high puppet at the moment and, you know, when we take him out we could discover that there's a problem with the turning of the chassis, that some of the structures won't hold. It's about deciding if something works and, if it doesn't, what we're going do: amputate that. Remake that. Restyle that. Decapitate that. Shove a wheel in there. Take a trumpet out of there. Put a piano in its spine. That's half the joy of it.
The Galway Arts Festival runs July 13th-26th. The 2009 Macnas parade, Orfeo, will take place on July 19th at 10pm and will include the Galway Gospel Choir
